URANIUM ENRICHMENT 4 countries' officials call for U.N. action on Iran

The United States offered significant incentives to Iran.
WASHINGTON POST
PARIS -- The foreign ministers of Britain, Germany and France called Thursday for Iran to be referred to the U.N. Security Council for violating its nuclear treaty obligations, saying that their more than two years of negotiations with the country reached a dead end earlier this week when the Iranians resumed uranium enrichment activities.
In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a similar call. The Security Council must deal with Iran's "defiance," she said.
In a televised news conference in Berlin, the three European diplomats said they would ask the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, to convene an emergency meeting in Vienna and refer Iran to the Security Council, which could impose economic and other sanctions. Western diplomats said the IAEA meeting could be held in about two weeks.
In a joint statement, the top diplomats of the European Union said Iran had spurned all offers from the outside world for better relations in exchange for continuing to hold its enrichment activities in abeyance.
What U.S. offered
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that even the United States, which broke relations with Iran in 1979 after students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, had offered significant incentives.
He said Secretary of State Rice last May authorized him to tell Iranian officials that in exchange for shelving their sensitive nuclear programs, the United States would lift its embargo on the shipment of spare aircraft parts to Iran and would stop blocking Iran's efforts to join the World Trade Organization. Straw called that "a very big prize, and a very big decision by the United States."
The diplomats said they would continue to search for a political and diplomatic solution to the stand-off. But Thursday's decision to push for Security Council involvement seemed to herald the end of a 2 1/2 -year-effort by the so-called EU-3 to negotiate with Iran to stop its most sensitive nuclear activities.
Seeking to hand the matter over to the Security Council "constitutes a new phase, but not the end of our diplomatic efforts," said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. He and the other ministers were joined at the news conference by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
The issue came to a head Tuesday when Iran ordered IAEA inspectors to break the agency's seals on a nuclear plant in Natanz so it could resume uranium enrichment research. Enriched uranium, depending on its quality, can be used to produce nuclear energy or nuclear bombs.
The United States and the European Union believe that Iran's nuclear program is secretly aimed at developing nuclear weapons, citing years in which it concealed its nuclear activities from international inspectors. Iranian officials deny the charge, saying that all their activities are for the development of peaceful nuclear energy.
They say that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran has signed, allows the country to have a nuclear program that includes uranium enrichment. Iranian officials assert that Western powers, particularly the United States, are practicing "nuclear apartheid" to keep less developed countries from advancing.
Russia, which is helping Iran build a $1 billion nuclear reactor, attempted to broker a compromise, offering to enrich uranium for Iran.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Lavrov told Rice earlier this week that Russia would not vote against a motion at the IAEA to refer Iran to the Security Council.
U.S. and European diplomats have contended for months that they had the votes in the agency's 35-member board to send Iran to the Security Council. But they have not done so because of opposition from Russia and China, which hold vetoes on the council.
In September, the board voted 22-1 to find that Iran had violated its nuclear treaty obligations, with 12 countries, including Russia and China, abstaining.
The resolution obligates the board to report Iran to the Security Council at some point, but it explicitly deferred the date, which persuaded several countries to abstain on the resolution rather than oppose it.